The Price

by Joseph Garraty

  I stood with the congregation, face wet with tears of rage or betrayal or—or I don’t know. While the voices swelled around me, I muttered a different, darker set of words.

  At the far end of the church, the crucifix burst into flames.

  I walked out, head held high, with screams of terror echoing off the stone walls behind me.

  Chapter 16. Apartment

  I was barely halfway down the block when my phone started buzzing in my pocket. I took it out—Benedict. I didn’t know where his drunk ass had vanished to while I was getting slammed into the ground and searched, and I didn’t care anymore. I wound up, picked up my left leg like a pro baseball pitcher, and threw the phone against the nearest house as hard as I could. The result was less dramatic than I’d hoped, but the screen shattered and the casing broke open. I left it there like a gutted carcass, and I kept walking.

  My own apartment building was untouched. Benedict had shown me the wards to keep others from finding me or my place, and I refreshed them regularly. If the Russians knew where I was, it was from old-fashioned surveillance, not magical skullduggery. That didn’t mean they weren’t lying in wait for me up there, but I was still angry enough to welcome that. Angry enough to want a fight, yet so numb I didn’t care if I lost. You figure that one out.

  I went up the stairs, disarmed the wards, and unlocked the door. Inside, all appeared to be as I’d left it, though there was a faint musty smell. I thought that was odd until I realized I hadn’t been here in weeks. I went to the bedroom and lay down on the bed, mind running in tight spirals. The end point of all of them was carnage, and at last I understood Benedict’s insanity from the previous night. Eventually, you run out of patience for the cat-and-mouse game, and if the war goes on long enough and the losses are great enough, the appeal of a straight head-on fight—fist, knife, or gun—becomes undeniable. I was going to make Old Man Chebyshev and his goons pay, and just then it seemed like it must be almost infinitely satisfying to carve a burning swath through them, heedless of the danger, killing and killing like a mad dog until somebody finally took me down.

  Maybe I’d do exactly that. The only thing that kept me from starting right away, right that instant, was that I might be able to do a lot more damage if I slowed down and thought about it.

  These and equally cheery thoughts bounced around in my head for an interminable time, generating visions of pain and blood and death that had no power anymore to shock me. I regarded them as a mechanic regards a socket set—a set of similar tools for different jobs.

  A banging on my door brought me to attention, causing my whole body to tense up. I relaxed when I realized nobody who intended to fuck me up would have bothered knocking. Kelsen would have blown the door off its hinges, and the other Russians would have kicked it in. Whoever it was could go hang. I settled my head back on the pillow.

  More banging. Then, a muffled voice: “Come on, Jimmy! Open the door!”

  It was Benedict. He sure hadn’t wasted any time getting over here.

  “Fuck off!” I shouted. I wasn’t sure if he could hear me from there, but I wasn’t too worried about it, either.

  More banging. He could have let himself in at any time, but he chose to whack away on the door instead. I guessed that was his way of being polite.

  “I’m not going away, Jimmy!”

  “Yeah. I figured,” I muttered, and I got up.

  I walked over and opened the door, turning away almost the instant it swung open. If he wanted in, he’d follow me in. I didn’t see any reason to make nice about it.

  I heard the soft click of the latch closing behind me, and I turned, leaning on the kitchen sink. Benedict stood in my kitchen, looking small and sorry. Sorry-pathetic, not sorry-apologetic. His usually neatly trimmed beard was lost in a forest of stubble, and his hair hung greasy and lank. He’d misplaced his scarf somewhere. He looked around the room at virtually everywhere but me, eyes shifting from one place to another before they had time to register anything.

  “Need a drink?” I asked.

  If he noticed the sarcasm, he didn’t show it. “Yeah,” he said.

  I had two beers in the fridge. I couldn’t remember buying them, so it must have been a while before, but I doubted Benedict would be too picky. He took the one I offered with a muttered thanks and downed half of it in one go.

  “Better?”

  “Yeah.” He pulled a chair out from the small table and sat. A few more seconds and the rest of the beer was gone. Wordlessly, I put the other in front of him. He opened it, but didn’t start in on it yet. “We got problems, Jimmy,” he said, finally meeting my eyes. His expression was about as earnest as I’d ever seen it, which caused me to distrust it at once.

  “We’ve got problems? Funny, I didn’t see you down at the police department. I guess they had you in a different section, huh?”

  “Jail’s just part of it, Jimmy. It happens. You’re out, aren’t you?”

  “I’m out,” I agreed. “How are your folks? Because mine are all fucked up. I’d say that’s a problem. I thought they were protected, Benedict. That was the fucking deal.”

  “The fucking Russians—they’re animals, Jimmy. You know we never go after family. This—this is over the line. We’re gonna get them for this.”

  I thought of the poor sucker Kelsen’s two-headed dog ate in the club. Was he an “animal”? No time for that shit. Not now. I pushed the thought away. “I’m going to get them for this, that’s for damn sure. I don’t know what you’re going to do. Ditch me like you did last night, would be my guess.”

  Benedict stiffened, like he’d suddenly remembered he had a spine. “Do you have a problem with how we do things? Because we can have that out right now. Right fucking now.” The steel in his eye cut through the alcoholic glaze in a way I hadn’t seen in a while, and I realized I could be in bad trouble here.

  Yet, somehow, my mouth ran itself. “Maybe I do have a problem. Yeah. You fucking ditched me. And you know what? That’s not even the worst of it. I’ve been doing your shit work for weeks. I don’t know if you don’t have the juice to do the shit me and Lazzaro have been working on or not, but I sure as hell know you ain’t got the balls. All that talk about how dangerous summoning demons is, all that crap about the price, and as soon as you think maybe it needs doing anyway, you throw me to the fucking dogs.” I’d never allowed those thoughts to fully crystallize before, but as they were spilling out of my mouth, I knew they were true. “Well, fuck you. I saw what you’re made of last night, Benedict, and I know the score now. If it’s my soul that’s getting pieces carved off it, I’m damn well going to decide what to do with it.”

  I half-expected him to vaporize me on the spot. At one level, I knew Benedict wasn’t nearly as powerful as I’d originally thought, but he was still the guy who’d taught me in the beginning, and he surely knew a thousand things I didn’t. He didn’t vaporize me, though. He simply leaned back in his chair and gave me an appraising look.

  “Okay, Jimmy. What do you want?”

  “I want a crew,” I said, before the words were even fully formed in my brain. “I’m gonna take this motherfucker Kelsen down, I’m gonna take him apart, but I need a crew to do it.”

  “I can’t make the guys respect you,” Benedict said. “But if you can get them to work for you, go for it.”

  “And I don’t work for you anymore. I work for the Slob.”

  “You’ll have to take that up with the Slob.” He grinned, surprisingly enough. “I don’t think you’ll like your new weekly nut, if he’ll have you, but that’s the price of moving up in the world.”

  “That’s it?” I said. “It’s just that easy?”

  Benedict leaned forward, elbows on the table, hands cradling the beer bottle, and pinned me with his bloodshot gaze. “We get Kelsen, and you can have anything I can give you. But we take that fucker down.”

  I nodded. “Yeah. I could drink to that.”

  Chapter 17. Meeting

  First thing I d
id after Benedict left was get a new phone, one of the prepaid deals. I’d have to give everybody my new number, but we got rid of our phones periodically anyway, so that was old hat. You’ve never seen a bunch of guys go through so goddamn many phones.

  Second thing: call Kit. I had some breathing room for a little while, since nobody was going to come fucking with me right now. A couple of days, and they’d probably try to gather me back into the fold and keep me from popping my head up around town, but for now, Benedict would tell them to leave me the fuck alone. That meant, if I wanted to talk to Kit, I needed to do it now.

  I called and set up another meeting for that night—this time so far out in the northern suburbs it would take me an hour to get there. She wasn’t happy about it, but she agreed to the meeting. She’d be less even happy when she found out what I wanted. Too fucking bad.

  With hours to kill before I had to leave, I started contemplating Kelsen’s trick. He wasn’t going through an elaborate ritual and sacrificing parakeets to drag things up from Hell—he was simply using a diagram and some blood, as near as I could tell. If he could do it, I could, or so I told myself, and I got to work.

  It wasn’t long before I wished I were at Benedict’s place. My apartment wasn’t exactly a well-supplied wizard lair, and aside from a mess of unused cleaning supplies under the sink and a half a stick of butter that had been safe to eat around the time Lucky Luciano was still a big shot, I didn’t have shit for materials. I even kinda missed Lazzaro. He’d had some good ideas when we were working on the summoning spell the first time around.

  “Man, you’re nuts,” I said to the empty room. Lazzaro was trouble, and I didn’t need any more of that.

  The more I thought about it, maybe the materials didn’t matter. Kelsen hadn’t had much. Hell, I’d learned to get rid of his nasty little creatures with barely more than a scrap of paper, too, so how hard could it be? The only thing I really missed was Benedict’s lab. If I somehow did manage to haul something into the regular world from elsewhere, I would have liked to be able to keep it bottled up. With my luck, whatever I summoned would bust out of here and terrorize the shit out of the neighbors.

  Oh, well. There was nothing to be done for it, other than being prepared to send it away once I’d called it up. That, at least, I felt competent to handle.

  The work was as maddening as ever, and as absorbing. The weird rush of magic coursed through my body, and my brain filled up with a distant, hazy perspective on the horrors of the last day. Even my old man, wrapped in acres of white gauze, seemed like a particularly nasty dream, but one without the power to hurt me. Dimly, that worried me, or least I thought it ought to, but I drew the lines and guided the chant, and I pulled the magic around me like a kid pulling his blanket over his head to keep the monsters out. The part of my mind that was obsessed with picking scabs and digging its thumbs into wounds both old and new was easy to put aside, and so I did.

  I met with one failure after another. When I looked up from my labors, hours later, it was time to go, and I had nothing to show for my efforts other than half a dozen shallow gashes in my left palm and a raging headache that I understood to be the psychic equivalent of blue balls. That was sure to do wonders for my disposition. I left the small stack of papers where it was, and I went out to the car.

  * * *

  “Are you okay?” Kit asked, concern dripping from her eyes in shiny black globs. I fought a shudder as the realization struck me that I’d be hearing that question every time she talked to me for a long, long time to come.

  “Yeah, I’m fine, other than the surroundings.” I probably shouldn’t have complained—I picked the place, after all—but the place was pretty odious, a trendy sports bar packed with the kind of guy whose idea of a hard day at work was a day in which the admin brought him a sandwich with mustard on it for lunch, and can’t that dumb bitch remember that I hate mustard? Guys with gelled hair, pressed shirts, and business cards, and their equally noisome female counterparts, their caked-on makeup gleaming oily in the flickering light from a plasma-screen TV the width of my car. As they shouted at the screens and bitched about trivialities, I imagined Big George wading into the room and laying about with those gigantic fists of his, breaking skulls left and right.

  Fuck, my head hurt.

  “You sure? Is there anything I can do?”

  Could there be a better opening? “Actually, yeah. I think so,” I said.

  There must have been something hungry or nasty in my tone, because Kit shrank back in her seat, suddenly reluctant. “Yes?” The word sounded like it had dragged itself from her mouth.

  “Last time we talked—hey, do you mind?” Some asshole had staggered by, bumping our table and sloshing Kit’s water almost out of the glass.

  “Sorry, man. It’s cool.”

  “I’ll tell you when it’s cool, dickwipe.” The urge to pound this one was strong. He was bigger than I was, but soft-looking, and pounding people was in my job description. I looked up into his glazed eyes. The fight would be over in one punch—I’d break his nose before he even realized I was swinging, and he’d drop, bleeding and crying, to the floor.

  “Sorry, man,” he said again. Something about his weasely voice was like needles slipping into the base of my brain, poking and prodding and generally just pissing me off. I was halfway out of my chair when I felt a hand on my arm.

  “Jimmy, let it go,” Kit said. She had her compassionate face on again, like she’d slipped it out of her purse and slapped it on the front of her head when I’d looked away. That infuriated me, too—was she acting, or really concerned?

  “Sorry, man,” the table-bumping idiot repeated. I kept my gaze fixed on Kit, knowing that if I did look at that fool, I really would pound him, and I had a feeling I might not be inclined to stop with one punch.

  “It’s cool,” I said evenly. “Now get the fuck outta here.” I still didn’t look at him directly, but at the edge of my vision I saw a blue smear recede into the crowd. The electric humming running through my muscles lessened but didn’t vanish, and the urge to hit someone didn’t quite fade. I made myself sit back down anyway.

  “Jimmy, this isn’t healthy,” Kit said. “You should be with your parents.”

  “Bull. I can’t help them just standing around crying.”

  It might have been the light, but I thought I saw a glimmer of wetness in Kit’s eyes. Oh, Christ, I thought. If she starts crying, I’ll start punching myself. I wished like hell that she’d put on the cop face again. “I think that’s the best way you can help them,” she said. “Maybe not ‘standing around crying,’ but at least being there for them.”

  “Right. Ma looks at me like I’m a cockroach in her cereal bowl, and Dad doesn’t even know I’m there. I’ve got a better idea—and I need your help.”

  She folded her arms, and I expected her to start scolding me, but her eyes still had that soft look. She said nothing.

  “Last time we met, I mean before the—the hospital, you were going to bring some stuff for me,” I said. “Information. Do you still have it?”

  She shook her head.

  “What did you do with it?” I could hear panic rising in my voice, and something like fury.

  “It doesn’t matter. I’m not going to give you a hit list.”

  My mouth hung open for long seconds before I found my wits. She waited with infuriating patience. “That’s not—I mean—”

  “Yeah, Jimmy. That’s what you want from me. A nice, tidy list of places you can go on a suicide run, racking up as high a body count as you can before they blow you apart.” She clasped her hands in front of her. “I’m not going to help you with that.”

  “You’re not . . .” I forced my mouth shut with a staggering effort. My jaw muscles ached, and my head had a mad highway worker loose in it, pounding on the inside with a jackhammer, and Kit sat there like the teacher’s pet in a second grade classroom, calmly waiting for Miss Whoozit to start going over the day’s assignment. I wanted to pick up
the table and throw it through the front doors. “You’re . . .” Deep breath. Another.

  Not enough.

  “Jesus fucking Christ, Kit, what are you trying to do to me here? Protect me? Babysit me? My father’s in the hospital, looking like somebody forgot to take him off the barbecue grill, and you’re trying to stop me from doing the one thing that can make this the least bit better? What the hell is wrong with you? Is this what you think he’d want?” I was shouting now, and people were moving away from the table, leaving us in the center of an empty bubble. I couldn’t look over there, though, or I’d start tearing into bodies like a feral cat. The only sound left in the whole place other than my voice was the droning of the TV.

  In the middle of the near-silence, Kit dropped one word. “Yes.”

  I ground my teeth together to keep my head from detonating.

  “You can get out of all this, but you gotta let it go. You’re not going to make anything better with a gun. We talked about witness protection, and—”

  “Fuck you! Fuck you and all your useless cop buddies and all your holier-than-thou self-righteous bullshit! You’re not protecting me, you’re protecting the fucking Russians!”

  “Don’t do this, Jimmy.”

  “I’ll do as I goddamn well please, no thanks to you.”

  “You should go,” she said, voice steady and hard, the same voice I imagined she used to tell sloppy drunk roughnecks to assume the position. “I think the manager is calling my ‘useless cop buddies.’”

  I shot a look over my shoulder, where a semicircle of enraptured and appalled stockbrokers with clean fingernails stared back. They flinched away when I met their eyes—every one of ’em. Beyond the crowd, behind the bar, a guy in a red shirt talked rapidly into the house phone, his eyes darting in my direction.